I've been reading this book, The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative by Vivian Gornick, given to me by ceciliatan for Christmas. I was struck by the following passage:

Resistance to earning our way is the common lot of humanity--we all resent deeply having to grow up--but one way or another, most of us make our peace with the requirement short of criminal recalcitrance. Arthur Wolff could not. The compulsion never to bring himself under discipline ruled his psyche. There was, finally, nothing and no one that could more command his loyalty. The need to have the best, and not pay for it, determined every move he made until the day he died.

And I realized that a fundamental tension within my personality, perhaps the tension (at least at the present), is my absolute desire to not have to do anything struggling with my deep-seated (albeit thoroughly resented) sense of responsibility.

This is an interesting thing to think about, and maybe not so easy to answer. I am betting there are lots of tensions in most people's characters, and it's a question of which is most prevalent at the moment.

My fundamental tension seems to be similar to yours. It's the disconnect between being bored with what I'm doing on a professional level and my fear and/or laziness keeping me from doing anything to change that radically.